


Untitled Painting

by mechafly



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Awkwardness, Cute, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Q hates everybody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 07:02:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechafly/pseuds/mechafly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Bond gives him a filthy stare that instead promises murder and makes Q feels like he's been drenched in cold water: he wonders for the hundredth time why he's sleeping with a medically certified psychopath.</i>
</p><p>In which Bond and Q have sex and dance awkwardly around each other, we discover Q's real name, Bond has other things on his mind, and Moneypenny is amused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untitled Painting

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. A massive thanks to everyone who read _No Future in England's Dreaming_ , your comments were kind, thoughtful, and immensely inspiring. I regularly re-read them and am amazed at how wonderful the AO3 reading community is. So thank you!

Q always takes ages to wake up: something about low blood pressure and the general ease of laziness that he's never had to shrug off, not when his life's work exists in a laptop not ten metres away. This time, he wakes up feel warmer than usual, and it takes him a full minute to register the man lying next to him in bed.

"Bond?" he murmurs, because that cool, blue gaze is unmistakeable. Bond's so still as to almost seem asleep, except that the tension which always emanates from him from him broadcasts alertness. Q stares up at Bond for the space of a breath. A rush of—something—makes him feel weightless, but the feeling soon passes.

"Intruder in the master bedroom," Q announces loudly, and rolls over to snooze for a little longer while giant mechanical arms shoot out of a trapdoor in the ceiling with an almighty, mechanical roar, and dangle Bond aloft in the air. Bond, to his credit, only gives one surprised shout before struggling furiously with the robotic arms holding him from every limb.

When Q's meandering thoughts finally spiral into wakefulness, he sits up and stretches out a full-bodied yawn. Bond stops struggling eventually, and he can feel Bond's stare on him. Q doesn't meet it. Is Bond accusatory today, Q wonders, resigned perhaps, or merely his usual state of observing, like a snake in shadows? Q gets up to shower, and tosses over his shoulder: "Really, Bond, crawling into people’s bed unannounced is hardly polite. One might even think you had untoward… intentions.” 

Bond resumes his struggle with a pained grunt. Pride, Q thinks, feeling pleased. Q pulls off his pyjama top and heads into the bathroom.

The shower is short and sweet, steam caressing him for every angle in a scalding embrace. The cubicle is tiny, and with a passing thought he realises it would never fit Bond, with all his elephantine layers of muscle. It is a meditative space of grey and steamed glass for Q only. Q closes his eyes and briefly feels safe, before shaking it off. It is hardly intelligent to feel safe in his life of work. 

Especially while naked.

When Q gets out of the shower, his hair's still dripping cool droplets down his neck and he can feel Bond's eyes on him again. Q opens his wardrobe and looks for clothes, abandoning the towel and pulling on a uniform of shirt, tie, soft trousers, and a slightly moth-eaten cardigan, his favourite. He has a feeling he'll need it today. 

"Alright, you can let him go," Q tells the robotic arms, which deposit Bond heftily on the ground. Bond rights himself immediately and crouches, as if ready to pounce, his focus intimidatingly centred on Q. 

"What was that?" Bond demands calmly. Q smiles at his wardrobe and searches for socks. Why, he wonders, does one never have enough socks?

"A... personal statement," Q says, angling a smirk Bond's way without actually meeting his eyes. He pulls on the now-found grey socks and a pair of loafers in rich leather brown. He does rather like these shoes. "My apartment really isn't for breaking and entering, I'm afraid."

"Didn't have anywhere else," Bond mutters, almost petulantly, and drops out of the terrifying battle stance.

"Have you seen my glasses?" Q interrupts, and takes the proffered glasses from Bond. 

Now that he can observe Bond clearly, he notes the blood drying on his temple, the uncharacteristically rumpled, half-unbuttoned shirt. It gives him a rather nice view of Bond's fantastically muscled chest. Q coughs and looks away, stalking into the kitchen. After a minute, Bond follows. "Tell me, 007, why are you here?"

“Don’t you know?” Bond counters, defiant as ever.

"I know everything about you," Q says quietly, feeling his mouth stretch to a smirk. He puts on the kettle and bustling about with the Earl Grey and a teapot and casting around for a clean mug. Bond stills, and Q thinks Bond is hopelessly naïve, for thinking there are places Q can't go, things Q can't see. 

"Then tell me why I'm here.”

Q hears the note of defiance, but perhaps the question, like so many others, is genuine. A Bond searching for answers, for the mechanics of his own mind to be presented to him in orderly pieces like well-tested gadgets, easy to use and dismiss and move on to the next kill.

Q waits for the kettle to come up to the boil and brews himself a cup of tea. Bond watches him, but then Bond is always watching, always waiting, poised like a reptile. And right now, the last thing Q wants to do is meet his Arctic, basilisk eyes. Therein lies inevitability, and Q does so very much hate not being in control.

Q takes a sip. Citrus-tinted, the taste of a wintry English morning. Perfect. "You've just got back from Berlin. But you haven't reported in to M." Q tilts his head, considering. Of course, Bond is perfectly still, a statue at the periphery of Q's vision. Always at the periphery, in the shadows, a pair of cool eyes like headlights, weighing up. To shoot or not to shoot, Bond had once told him, dismissing _The Fighting Temeraire_ and gazing at Q instead. "You don't trust the new M, do you? Not yet. Trouble in paradise—so you came here."

Q turns, takes steps to his desk, flicks on his laptop. "You didn't have anywhere else to go; we sold your flat last year after you were presumed dead. And you've just killed a man, perhaps several men, if that blood on your face—but no wounds, so not your own blood—is any indication.”

He takes another scalding sip of tea. The heat grounds him against Bond's magnetic presence. “You were too worked up to take your pick of hotels, decided to head somewhere less... uncertain. Somewhere you knew nobody would stab you in your sleep. And perhaps you were still high off the adrenaline, hoping for a quick release, yes?" 

Q hums softly as his programs start up, the laptop's mechanical whine a counter to Bond's unnatural stillness. Happily, the world appears to have kept itself ticking over while Q slept. A miracle every night. "You know, Moneypenny's apartment isn't far from here." 

“Really," Bond says flatly, and he suddenly springs explosively back into motion. Q's hand shakes and he puts down his mug with a rattling clink before it shows. Bond prowls around the room and then comes to a stop at the window, fixing his gaze on the rooftops of east London, as if calculating Moneypenny's co-ordinates. 

"Instead you came here, and got held prisoner for your trouble," Q announces, though Bond's attention seems to be fading from Q as he stares out at London, like a dying king surveying his land. "I would advise against it in future."

"Point taken," Bond tells him, his gravelly voice too loud in the quiet of Q's apartment. This is his home, where he likes to be solitary with only his work to distract him. Bond, massive, bloodied and physical, is as out of place as an escaped tiger. "I'll get consent next time."

Q coughs. "Now, unlike you, I have office hours to keep," he tells Bond, shutting the laptop with an abrupt sound. "Help yourself to a cup of tea. I trust you'll be gone by the time I return."

"When will that be?" Bond asks later, as Q moves to the front door, coat and suit jacket under one arm, briefcase in the other.

Q smiles into the cold rectangle of a London morning presented by his front door. "Oh, the early hours of tomorrow, I expect." He doesn't intend for it to come out like an invitation, but he can almost feel the bodily flex of Bond's amusement—or perhaps lust?—nonetheless. 

Q leaves before either of them can fuck things up any further.

It is, of course, far too late.

 

 

 

"Seen Bond?" Moneypenny asks him that morning. He's at his desk at the back of Q branch, perfectly innocent, but everything Moneypenny asks comes out like an interrogation these days. Q suspects she’s using them as practice for when she decides to take over the world.

She sends him a quizzical eyebrow, completely affable and entirely threatening. 

"Why do you ask?" He takes a calming sip of tea from his favourite Scrabble mug and lets his eyes rest on his screens, all six of them blinking and flashing. 

"M needs him to come in. He was supposed to back from Berlin yesterday."Moneypenny doesn't let up on the piercing, interrogative stare. 

When he was a child, Q used to feel himself chafe when people looked at him: minders, carers, and pretend-parents, all of them assessing, weighing, evaluating. He's not sure if he's ever fully grown out of that childhood discomfort with being looked at. Though now, he rather enjoys the privilege of not bothering to look back, a privilege afforded by the fact of being one of the most dangerous minds in the world. 

That's why Q's always liked paintings. They're there to be looked at, and never return the stares.

"If he comes in, notify us," Moneypenny orders flatly. "We have reason to believe he'll come to see you first." 

Q cocks his head and smirks briefly. "Whyever would you think that? I hardly think he approves of me."

Moneypenny raises an eyebrow. "You give him all his fun little toys to play with, don't you?" Her voice is low, easy, salacious. Q imagines the inevitable future of this woman becoming the next M. The thought is at once formidable and terrifying.

"Moneypenny," Q says, when she is about to turn to leave. He gets to enjoy her for a moment longer in her sky-high heels and long, piercingly scarlet pencil skirt. 

Women have never been his cup of tea (as it were), but Moneypenny commands attention the way she commands hundreds of MI6 agents—into death. The thought makes him bold. "Do you flirt this outrageously with everybody?" 

He asks it as a genuine question, but Moneypenny only regales him with a full-bodied smirk and saunters off, hips rhythmic and commanding. It takes Q a whole second to turn back to his work.

 

 

 

One of the few things Q actually likes about Bond is that Bond doesn’t bother with niceties. Q's already falling apart by the time Bond gets him on hands and knees, legs apart, cock pressing in. The pressure on his prostrate grows and grows and Q gasps, need and lust clogging his throat. Then Bond's _in_ him, fully, and Q's alternately moaning and choking because it feels, full and pressing and demanding, like iron and steel and the flex of every one of Bond's enormous sexy muscles pushing into one concentrated movement—

"Put your back into it!" Q gasps out loud, and he knows it is unwise to goad Bond on at this point but he's always been a creature of habit, and antagonising Bond is what he does best. Bond takes it as the challenge it is and begins pistoning into Q, every muscle grinding, and Q has to stifle a desperate, needy scream between gritted teeth because Bond is too much—it's all too much—every circuit in his brain fires and then short-circuits and all he can think is—nothing.

Bond, Q thinks, after the whole business is over with and Bond is a passed-out mountain of muscle on the other side of the bed. Bond fucks like he kills. 

It's an apt comparison, because Bond is a dangerous man, and Q is now in a considerable amount of pain. Bond, really, is a man not to be trifled with, much less by a too-young and naive agent who also happens to be the head of Q branch. 

It’s a bit much. Despite being in MI6, he really does do his best work at the breakfast table in his pyjamas. It’s the easy life. Bond appears determined to make it hell.

 

 

 

"Alright, alright, stop," Q says, and backs off a few paces from the hulking mass that is 007 when he's ready to leap. It's an evening like any other, Bond stalking him home and then leaping on him through the window. Q needs to catch his breath, but Bond looks mussed and ready for sex and Q knows he must look the same way, what with how his mouth stings after Bond's been biting it and how his hair feels like it's been pulled completely out of shape. (And he spent hours this morning on his hair, it hardly seems fair.) "I—look, I need a glass of water and a minute to breathe, so could you please go and wait for me in the bedroom, I'll be there in five minutes."

"What?" Bond says, and his look of incredulity nearly makes Q laugh, except that Q has cultivated seriousness to suit every occasion. Extreme, mature seriousness. Yes.

Q smiles. "Never had someone keep you waiting before, 007?" 

Bond gives him a filthy stare that instead promises murder and makes Q feels like he's been drenched in cold water: he wonders for the hundredth time why he's sleeping with a medically certified psychopath, and, as Bond stalks away towards the bedroom, decides it's high time for that cup of tea.

 

 

 

"But you're not really even James Bond, are you?" Q demands, on another evening. He’s known Bond’s real name since they first met but it’s the first time he’s let it slip. Q blames the alcohol, and irritably resolves never to drink again.

Bond's glinting ice-eyes are as eloquent as a question, or maybe that’s just Bond’s sex drive Q sees. "007 may be your codename, but Bond's just as good as one.”

Bond tilts his head, considers Q for a minute, a cold, efficient gaze. “Well, it’s my real name.”

Q scoffs. “But how many more James Bonds will there be, once they're done with you? When you're nothing but a shadow for someone else to step into, once you—" Q bites off the rest of it. He deplores losing control of himself.

"Aren't we all shadows?" Bond murmurs, voice even as it always is, eyes raking down to Q's mouth as strong as a touch. "Q." 

"007," Q replies out of habit, and Bond's kiss says everything about the futility of struggling against the roles they've been given, the parts they've been cast to play. Let this little drama play out, and come to its foregone conclusion.

And Bond's roughness says, this, and only this, is an escape. Q wishes immediately he could take back that glimpse into everything Bond is. The sex, the murder, the dead lovers, the danger, the drink. 

It's like looking into the void, where knives sink and skies fall and hearts bleed and time rolls on like a gargantuan machine, and it disquiets him to the core until Bond, mercifully, makes him forget.

 

 

 

"Do you look forward to dying?" Q asks him once, dazing with the post-orgasm haze before pain and muscle tiredness sets in. 

He hears a questioning grunt from Bond, and the bed groans as Bond turns over, runs a hand through Q's messy and knotted hair. Almost gentle, which is scarier than anything else they've done tonight.

"Dying," Q murmurs, feeling sleep pulling him in. “Do you look forward to it?” Bond is warm as he presses up against Q, inviting and solid, but dangerous nonetheless. Q relaxes against him with a full-bodied sigh. 

"You’ll be dead soon, unless I'm very much mistaken, which," Q sighs, drifting off. "I rarely am." 

 

 

 

"I always come back," Bond murmurs, much, much, later. He watches Q, lost in deep sleep with his arm thrown around Bond's waist and his usually blank face slack with a smile. 

Q's dark hair and pretty face had been an immediate echo of Vesper for Bond, the way it is with almost everyone Bond has sex with. They are the shadows of Vesper he fucks as a helpless prayer to a vengeful phantom he cannot put to rest. 

But like this, Q resembles Vesper less than ever. Vesper with her guarded, glinting eyes, her sharp, glass-shard guilt, and the dagger-cut void she has left in him. Vesper is crystals and aged moonlight and, finally, slick darkness.

Q, by contrast, is young. Vulnerable. A phantom. Easily killed, if Bond wished it. 

But death, Bond has come to find, has its own rhythm.

 

 

 

Bond is holding a piece of paper in a manila folder in his hand, speed-reading. Q instantly recognises it as his own top secret identity records—how could he not, it is the distillation of his own life, his human self—which is to be opened only in the event of his honourable death in the service of the British government. Q doesn’t even question how Bond got ahold of it and attempts to tackle Bond to the floor. 

Sadly, this fails pathetically, but Bond does drag his eyes for a second away to survey Q moaning on the ground. "Is your name really Ralph Twisleton-Wykeham?"

Q glares up at him. "My name, 007, is Q."

"I see," Bond replies, but his mouth twitches and his eyes sparkle with deadly, deadly mischief, and Q does not trust Bond as far as he could throw him. Which is to say that he does not trust Bond one tiny, tiny bit.

“Why in God’s name are you going through my personal records, 007?” Q asks flatly, standing up and calculating all the ways he can find out something about Bond to blackmail the man with—if only he weren’t so bloody shameless about his promiscuous behaviour and near-failed missions.

“Well, you know my name,” Bond tells him. “My real one. I thought it was only fair I find out yours.”

“Bond, your name is not exactly a well-kept secret around here,” Q says imperiously.

Bond smiles. “Don’t worry, I think I rather prefer ‘Q’.”

“So do I," Q replies icily.

“So, 007 reporting for duty. When’s my next mission?” If Q is feeling creeped out by peppy Bond, he refuses to comment.

He clears his throat. “It’s now, actually. Your guns, trackers, etcetera, will be on location when you arrive. And you are scheduled to catch your plane in half an hour.” Bond just keeps smiling at him, and Q raises an eyebrow. “Well, off you go then.”

And, mercifully, Bond goes.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The title of this story is from 'Untitled Painting', [an artwork hanging in the Tate Modern gallery in London](http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/art--language-michael-baldwin-untitled-painting-t12331). The painting is a mirror that confronts the viewer with themselves.  
> 2\. Ralph Fiennes's real name is 'Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton Wykeham Fiennes'. I was too amused not to use it somewhere, so now it's Q's name.


End file.
